Small businesses are using the COVID-19 pandemic to sell face masks

Craftsy entrepreneurs are doing brisk business in the new cottage industry of selling artisanal face masks.

What’s happening: Online stores are selling out of face masks within minutes of listing new stock — in some cases, after being featured in an article from the likes of GQ, Vogue or the lifestyle blog Man Repeller.

Etsy, long seen as a purveyor of artisan-made goods, reported in a recent earnings call that in April the platform saw $133 million in sales of fabric face masks.

What they’re saying:

Adrienne Antonson, founder of STATE the Labelin Athens, Ga., says that from the moment her small-batch, hand-painted clothing company started offering masks, it could barely keep up with demand. The company is selling and donating masks, and published a pattern for others to use.

“We sold out of 25 masks within minutes.” says Antonson. “We said, ‘Let’s restock.’ By the end of the day, we had sold 200 masks within 14 minutes.”

Naomi Mishkin, the Brooklyn-based designer behind made-to-order clothing line Naomi Nomi, had a similar experience. (Her company is donating a mask for every one sold.)

At first — specifically, on Friday, April 3, at 5:50 p.m. — her company had about 500 requests to be on a waitlist for masks.

Ten minutes later, the New York Times blasted out an alert saying the CDC had officially recommended wearing face masks. Minutes later — at 6:05 p.m. — “GQ dropped an article saying ‘here are 5 brands that are selling them,'” Mishkin recalls.

“We were #3. By the end of the weekend, we had requests for 10,000 masks.”

Designers largely aren’t profiting on mask sales — but they’re keeping their businesses alive and their employees on payroll, and in some cases expanding their customer base.

Some are also raising serious money for charity. An example: Detroit-based clothing brand DIOP raised $28,500 (as of Friday evening) for Feed the Frontlines Detroit, which supports local restaurants and serves meals to emergency and health care workers.